In Washington, Lincoln knew exactly who had won Fort Donelson. The day after the victory, when Secretary of War Stanton brought him the papers nominating Grant for promotion to major general of Volunteers, a rank still junior to Halleck’s commission as a major general in the Regular Army, the president from Illinois signed them and said, “If the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or Western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.”
5
THE BOND FORGED AT SHILOH
With the fall of Fort Donelson. the South became vulnerable. Grant was eager to move on up the Cumberland and take Nashville. If he and other Union commanders could “keep the ball moving as lively as possible,” pushing south into enemy territory, the Northern spearhead would cut the South’s east-west railroad lines, which Jefferson Davis called “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” Unless the Confederate Army blocked the coming offensive, the way would be open for Union columns to march down to the Gulf of Mexico. The South could be split in two.
It became a race against time. Albert Sidney Johnston, the general entrusted by Jefferson Davis to organize the Confederate defense in the Western theater, was a handsome mustachioed West Pointer who had been a cadet with Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. At the age of fifty-eight he was the South’s oldest general, admired by his contemporaries and his troops. He had formed an east-to-west defensive line that Grant had now fractured. After Fort Donelson fell, Johnston’s headquarters at Bowling Green, Kentucky, to the northeast, was in danger of being cut off from Confederate territory and armies to the south; Johnston abandoned Bowling Green and was managing to bring his troops, many of them sick from the winter weather, safely south in a difficult circuitous retreat, picking up additional brigades and regiments along the way until he had seventeen thousand men with him.
The Confederacy was throwing in its reserves. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Joseph E. Johnston continued as leaders in the Eastern theater of war, but Jefferson Davis sent Beauregard from Virginia to be Albert Sidney Johnston’s second in command. General Braxton Bragg was coming up from Mobile, Alabama, with ten thousand men, Leonidas K. Polk was retreating from Kentucky with another ten thousand, and five thousand were on the way from New Orleans. General John C. Breckinridge reported in to Johnston; William J. Hardee was already serving with him. There was a chance that as many as twenty thousand Confederate soldiers could come from Arkansas to join Johnston.
The potential number of Southern defenders was large, but Johnston knew that Grant could have as many as forty thousand men, confident after taking Forts Henry and Donelson, and Don Carlos Buell was marching slowly from Kentucky with more than twenty-five thousand. There would be an epic collision, somewhere. Speaking of the white population of the South, Johnston proclaimed to his soldiers that “the eyes and hopes of eight millions of people rest upon you.” In the days to come, as more units from across the South rallied to him, Johnston decided to gather his forces at the important railway center of Corinth in northeastern Mississippi, just below the Tennessee border. The South could ill afford to lose this hub, which was a true railway crossroads: the Memphis and Charleston Railroad line, coming from Memphis eighty miles to the west, passed through Corinth going east to Decatur and Huntsville in Alabama, and on to Chattanooga; the north-south Mobile, and Ohio line also ran through there, connecting trains moving to and from the Gulf of Mexico. If the Union Army seized Corinth, a critical portion of the South’s railway system would fall under Northern control.
In times of peace, one of the ways that goods reached Corinth from the Tennessee River was by way of a road from Pittsburg Landing, a steamboat wharf twenty miles to the northeast. Three miles in from the high bluff above the wharf, on a ridge in the woods, stood a one-room Methodist church, a log meetinghouse with the biblical name of Shiloh—“Place of Peace.”
As days passed and Johnston’s force at Corinth grew, he had no idea of how much time he had to organize a defense, or whether he might possibly have enough time to prepare his green but eager troops to launch an offensive. It appeared that time was not on Johnston’s side. If Grant could keep his momentum and take Tennessee’s virtually undefended capital of Nashville, his next step would be to move his victorious army swiftly over from the Cumberland River to the Tennessee. If Grant could then steam up to Pittsburg Landing to attack and defeat Johnston’s army at Corinth, and there might be no limit to how much farther federal columns could then penetrate the South.
Grant’s superior General Henry Halleck gave Albert Sidney Johnston the time he needed. At a time of success, a time when Grant should indeed have been allowed to “keep the ball moving,” Halleck hesitated to authorize Grant to do just that, partly for fear that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard might be able to cut north and retake either Fort Henry or Paducah, Kentucky; he even went so far as to call this doubtful threat “the crisis of the war in the west.” As for the intellectual underpinnings of this caution, Halleck was following concepts he had put forth in his book The Elements of Military Art and Science, ideas based on those of the French military theorist Antoine Henri Jomini and others who believed that victories could best be won by maneuver and mass, rather than by aggressive frontal attacks. Halleck’s ambition worked in tandem with his caution; intent on his vision of the war and his central place in it, Halleck felt he could delay any Union offensive long enough to bargain with Washington for the supreme command in the West.
In contrast to Halleck, Grant, who after Fort Donelson immediately sent naval and then land forces up the Cumberland to take unopposed possession of Clarksville, Tennessee, forty-five miles from Nashville, wired Halleck’s headquarters for permission to go on, saying that he could “have Nashville” within ten days. To his surprise, Halleck shot back a telegram ordering him not to advance with his reorganized victorious army, which now numbered thirty-six thousand men, including twelve thousand just sent up to him by Sherman.
This was all difficult to fathom for men of action like Grant and Commodore Foote, but they were unaware of the extent to which Halleck’s ambition was controlling the situation. Halleck apparently felt that he could dictate his terms for advancement and sent the Union general in chief McClellan a message saying that “I must have top command of the [Western] armies,” adding that “hesitation and delay are losing us this golden opportunity,” when in fact the only “hesitation and delay” were his own. He finished this with a peremptory, “Lay this before the President and Secretary of War. May I assume command? Answer quickly.”
As Grant waited, McClellan refused to give Halleck what he wanted and refused to draw Lincoln and Stanton into the decision, but McClellan’s reason for doing this showed yet another aspect to the game of military politics. McClellan, who at the time was giving lavish dinner parties in Washington while allowing the Confederates time to fortify and reinforce their positions in northern Virginia, and who was issuing few orders that would start a Union offensive in any theater of operations, wanted no rivals for his position as general in chief. In turning down Halleck, McClellan pointed out that Buell, who had replaced Sherman at Louisville and held equal rank with Halleck, was marching toward the scene of impending action. There was no reason to place Halleck above him.
Thwarted by McClellan, Halleck bypassed him, going out of the chain of command and approaching Secretary of War Stanton directly with a message that said, “One whole week has been lost by hesitation and delay. There was, and I think there still is, a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow, but I can’t do it unless I control Buell’s army.” When Stanton replied flatly, “The President does not think any change in the organization of the army or the military departments advisable,” Halleck turned back to matters that were his to control and continued to hold Grant at Clarksville. (Writing to Halleck’s chief of staff Brigadier General George W. Cullum, Grant said, “It is my impression that by following up our success Nashville would be an easy conquest,” but he did not express
the frustration shown by Commodore Foote, who wrote his wife that “I am disgusted that we were kept from going up and taking Nashville. It was jealousy on the part of McClellan and Halleck.”)
While keeping Grant from seizing Nashville, Halleck continued to rehabilitate Sherman. Always mindful of Sherman’s powerful connections in Washington and impressed by the job that he had done since his return from his breakdown and forced twenty-day leave, first in training thousands of troops and then in supporting Grant’s efforts, Halleck told Sherman that he could start organizing various regiments into a division of his own, to lead in future battles.
Sherman went to work. As he wrote Ellen, “Learning some days past that the Confederates are simply abandoning Columbus [Kentucky, across the Mississippi River from Belmont, Missouri, the scene of Grant’s first battle] I sent a party of cavalry to go as near as possible.” In addition to this, Sherman embarked a regiment of nine hundred men on a large steamboat at Paducah and took them down there. At Columbus he encountered another example of Halleck’s failure to take advantage of opportunities. Not only was the place empty, but Sherman found that the Confederates had been given so much time that “they carried off nearly all their [artillery] guns, and materials, burned their huts and some corn and provisions.”
Landing and leaving troops to establish a garrison there, Sherman returned to Paducah. In one sense, it had been a venture with little military result, but for the first time in months he had been in active command of troops away from a headquarters, had planned the entire amphibious operation, and had executed it with precision. The man who had begged Lincoln to keep him always in a subordinate position had succeeded in an independent command, entirely on his own. Back at Paducah he continued to assemble his division, which soon numbered nine thousand men.
Earlier, tethered though Grant was, forty-five miles short of Nashville and with no idea of the reasons for being held there, he once again saw an opportunity to move Union troops forward. Don Carlos Buell had dispatched a division from Kentucky to support Grant at the time he was moving to attack Fort Donelson; now, as they arrived aboard a large fleet of paddle-wheelers a week after the battle, Grant realized that these thousands of men were not under Halleck’s control. Telling their commander, Brigadier General William Nelson, not to bring his regiments ashore, he ordered him to proceed on with them and take Nashville, which they did, quickly and without bloodshed.
As a result of his quick thinking, Grant now had two commanders angry with him. Buell, who soon arrived at Nashville with the rest of his army, felt that Grant had commandeered some of his forces with an unauthorized order, robbing him of the chance to enter the city at the head of his troops. Halleck felt that Grant had broken the spirit if not the law of his own orders to stay where he was.
Next came a serious breakdown in communications between Grant and Halleck. This began when Grant, who had no orders to do so and normally should have stayed with his army, went to Nashville briefly to confer with Buell. Unknown to Grant or Halleck, the civilian telegraph operator at the Union headquarters in Cairo, Illinois, was certainly a Confederate sympathizer and possibly an active spy; in any event, the man threw away the messages and reports from Grant that were to be sent on to Halleck in St. Louis. As a result, Halleck heard nothing from Grant for a week and did not know how much of that time Grant spent in Nashville, away from his command.
With no response to several requests that Grant send him various types of information, Halleck dispatched a complaining report of this to McClellan. Halleck said in part, “It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it … Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future. I am worn-out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.”
This time Halleck had McClellan on his side. Perhaps for a moment thinking of Grant only as the captain who had been on one of his “sprees” while outfitting McClellan’s expedition to explore the Cascade Range in the Oregon Territory in 1853, and possibly with an eye to keeping in check a fast-rising potential rival, the general in chief replied the next day. “The future success of our cause demands that proceedings such as Grant’s should at once be checked.” McClellan told Halleck. “Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of the service requires it.” McClellan added that if Grant were removed, his replacement should be General Charles F. Smith, whose brave leadership storming a slope at Fort Donelson had done so much to win that day.
Halleck was still angry with Grant and thought that McClellan might have memories of the old army gossip about Grant’s drinking. The next day, still delaying meaningful action fifteen days after the fall of Fort Donelson, Halleck spent still more time writing to McClellan: “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my oft-repeated orders. I do not deem it advisable to arrest him at present, but I have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee.” Halleck was not replacing Grant, but leaving him in command in the rear while Smith, whom Grant greatly admired, was to come back down the Cumberland River where Fort Donelson stood and lead a portion of Grant’s forces on amphibious raids up the Tennessee.
Until Grant received the order from Halleck spelling this out, he had no idea that Halleck was, as Sherman observed, “working himself into a passion” about his subordinate’s seemingly defiant disregard of orders and command authority. He quickly replied to Halleck that he was sending Smith up the Tennessee as ordered and added that, based on intelligence reports, “Forces going … must go prepared to meet a force of 20,000 men. This will take all of my available troops.” That last comment was an effort to regain lost momentum through others. Even though now tied by Halleck’s order to his own rear headquarters, Grant was attempting to change the concept of a small raiding force into a major movement by his entire command. Then, addressing Halleck’s overall complaint, he told Halleck, “I am not aware of ever having disobeyed any order from Head Quarters, and certainly never intended such a thing.”
This exchange of communications between Halleck and Grant continued, with Halleck criticizing Grant while Grant forthrightly justified himself. As letters and telegrams moved back and forth, Grant told Halleck three times that if Halleck thought he was not doing his job properly, he should be allowed to resign his command. Grant was learning a bit about military politics himself: at one point he or his staff telegraphed a copy of one of Halleck’s complaints, and Grant’s answer, to Congressman Washburne in Washington. Washburne promptly went over to the White House and placed the matter before President Lincoln. This resulted in a message from Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to Halleck, informing him that the president was taking a personal interest in these allegations and requesting Halleck to spell out any charges of malfeasance and insubordination he had to make against Grant.
As this was going on, Sherman received the order to take his division up the Tennessee River as part of the expedition, led by General Smith, that Grant was being held back from commanding. On March 12 he wrote Ellen from Savannah, Tennessee, nine miles short of Pittsburg Landing on the opposite side of the Tennessee River.
Dearest Ellen,
Here we are up the Tennessee, near the Line [the South’s railroad corridor from Memphis to Chattanooga] with about 50 boat loads of soldiers. I have the fifth Division composed mostly of Ohio Soldiers about 9000—but they are raw & Green … The object of the expedition is to cut the Line … along which are distributed the Enemy’s forces.
Let what occur that may[,] you may rest assured that the devotion & affection you have exhibited in the past winter has endeared you more than ever, and that if it should so happen that I can regain my position and Self respect and should Peace ever be restored I will labor hard for you and for our children.
I am still of the opinion that although the blow at Fort Donel
son was a terrible one to the Confederates they are still far from being defeated, and being in their own country they have great advantage … Today we shall move further up the river.
Despite the energetic and determined efforts made by Sherman and his men to cut the railway line east of Corinth, they were literally drowned out by rains that raised the Tennessee River fifteen feet in a single day. Sherman fell back down the river to Pittsburg Landing and began to prepare a vast encampment for the Union divisions that were to arrive there by ship and by road. At the moment, both Grant and Sherman thought of the place purely in terms of being a staging area for a march south to attack Corinth.
In the dispute between Grant and Halleck, by the time Halleck received the request from Lorenzo Thomas that he enumerate any formal charges he had to make against Grant, the entire high command of the Union Army had changed. Lincoln had vacated the position of general in chief by assigning McClellan to take active field command of the Eastern army, the Army of the Potomac. Although Lincoln was frustrated by McClellan’s delay in mounting a major offensive into Virginia, and some in Washington were referring to McClellan as the Great American Tortoise, at this time there was no official censure of McClellan; “Little Mac” was simply being removed from overall command of the Union Army so that he could devote himself entirely to winning the war on the front south of Washington.
With this reorganization, Halleck was given what he wanted: command of all the forces in the Western theater, in a new entity called the Department of the Mississippi. Halleck was now equal to McClellan, with Buell as his subordinate; no Union officer stood higher than he. Rejoicing in his elevation and eager to dispose of what now seemed to him a minor matter involving Grant, Halleck took the position that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding. He had no intention of losing the services of his most successful subordinate and sent Grant a telegram assuring him that “instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your new army is in the field, to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 12